STUART, CRAIG AND RAY…..

Three: Bivalves or Bust

Photo: Warapol Kingwongsa

“On the way home, I had a sudden stab of dread concerning the beet and potato salad,” writes Julie Powell in her uproarious escapade Julie and Julia.
I hear you sister.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve fretted over fondue, the sleepless nights worrying myself sick about soufflé recipes and sausage fillings, the recurring anxiety attacks brought on by the mere mention of asparagus. Yep I’ve been there, done that Jules. Jesus, who hasn’t?
Well, my friend Stu for one.
When it comes to things culinary, he is calm, cool, collected, a master chef in fact.
Stu would blow Julie Powell out of the soup kettle.
I have no doubt he could master the art of French cooking in a few hours; whip up all 524 of Julia Child’s recipes in an afternoon with ample time left to adjust the Persian rug, prune the bonsai and run a feather duster over his exquisite -- if mostly pilfered collection of bronze Angkorian horse heads before the dinner guests arrived.
Stu is the only one of my friends who could carry off a task of this magnitude – and with more aplomb and less histrionics than Ms. Powell.
He is also the only one of my friends to have appeared on national television in a pink ostrich feather-trimmed satin gown belting out Diana Ross and the Supremes’ Baby Love, but we’ll get to that a bit later.
A dinner invitation to the home of Stu and Tum – his gorgeous boyfriend – is something to be savored.
Superb food is assured. There’s not a dessert fork or soup spoon out of place. The crockery is tasteful, the fashionably embroided table cloth immaculate and of quality fabric, the imported scented candles giving off just the right amount of light (unless you’ve dropped acid, but I won’t go into that now).
All in all, it’s a delight.
While this is to be admired, it should be pointed out that these sumptuous soirees tend to be civilized (until the 5th bottle of wine at least) A-list affairs, which I fear may have caused my friend to sink into complacency.
Granted, the ability to whip up a masala-seared salmon in coconut curry butter at the drop of a hat is a gift. I could no sooner do it than fly to the moon or iron a pair of slacks.
Yes, it takes skill to produce grilled scallops wrapped in pancetta and basted with pineapple mojito vinaigrette from leftovers in the fridge, I’ll give him that.
But once you’ve done this 65 times for beautiful, witty, urban people in designer outfits, don’t you risk becoming blasé? Where’s the challenge? Does your creativity diminish? And why do I suddenly sound like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City?
What would happen, I wondered, if he was catapulted back to the basics; demoted to the D-list or, god forbid, forced at blowpipe-point to whip up some grub for boring, plain people. Sorry, I mean salt-of-the-earth bush folk.
I decided to put it to the test.
“When it comes to finding bush food we need to be open-minded: many sources of nutrition will be strange to us, some even repugnant,” warns Ray Mears in his life-affirming “Ray Mears Essential Bushcraft: A Handbook of Survival Skills From Around the World.”
“But if it’s a matter of survival, we must not allow our prejudice to deter us from obtaining nourishment.”
Stu is so open-minded it hurts. Nothing about him is the slightest bit repugnant.
He is urbane, charming, intelligent and almost as handsome as me.
But I know that beneath this flawless Martha Stewart façade, some deep-fried prejudices are simmering.
I’ve noticed Stu’s disdain at the mismatching cutlery at my own shambolic dinner parties, if you can call them that; his abhorrence at my choice of servants’ uniforms, the barely disguised incredulity at my taste in placemats.
Stu’s task was to whip up a three-course meal using any or all of Ray Mears’ bush ingredients and a wildcard insect of his choice.
Ray’s list: Fungi, roots, ants, caterpillars, torpedo worms, thistles, seeds, berries, seaweed, bivalves, edible mollusks, tent poles – though I may have confused that last one with the ‘How to Build a Shelter’ chapter as I’d had a few bush tequilas by that point. My task was to help, to learn, or at the very least try not to be as annoying as I usually am.
Swift evening spreads over Bangkok as I venture from my upscale neighborhood to Stu’s less salubrious suburb. A few miles downtown, red shirt political protests are threatening to turn violent and a State of Emergency looms amid this hot season inferno.
Being a Bangkokian, I look on the bright side. The latest threat of civil war means less traffic and I am at Chez Stu-gup-Tum’s in no time.
What a feast awaits.
Stu greets me at the door in his floor-length Kath and Kim apron, brandishing a plate of incinerated “tiny jumping frogs” and “crispy grasshopper” aperitifs (I’m quite serious).
“We were going do them in a honey marinade, which would have added flavor, but … “ he starts to explain, the wry, sardonic smile that I’ve misread many times during our 7 year friendship beginning to take shape.
And as I’ve done scores of times in the past, I interrupt, talk over the top of him, and steal the limelight by snatching two of the vile creatures from the crystal serving dish and downing them in a single gulp, before he has time to add “but we did whip up a chili dipping sauce which makes them at least palatable. I wouldn’t advise eating them raw, they may be poisonous.”
I feel myself turning an unfashionable shade of green and I seem to have a grasshopper leg lodged in my windpipe.
“This is very impressive, have you been out in the rice paddies trapping frogs and catching grasshoppers,” I splutter, trying to disguise my gagging by lip-synching to Lady Ga Ga, who is booming from the latest in home entertainment systems along side the living room feature wall.
“No, this is Bangkok, a man on a bicycle sells them door to door. Are they tasty?”
“Wo-a-oha oooh ahooooo oooh oh, caught in a bad romance,” I retch as Stu steers me to the balcony where Tum is working wonders with fish wrapped in banana leaves held together with adorable little lemongrass stalks on the BBQ.
“And here are … drumroll ….. three types of bivalves,” Stu declares, proffering a plate of shelled atrocities.
“We added salt and pounded the ingredients together in a mortar and pestle. ALWAYS carry a mortar and pestle when you are in the bush, it’s an absolute necessity. Or you could improvise one from a lump of rock and a boomerang. Now over here we have the fungi – organic shitake mushrooms from the Emporium Department Store’s natural forest section,” he continues in that irritating overly cadenced Melbourne accent. “What do you think Craig?”
“Stop callin’, stop callin’ , I don’t want to think anymore, I left my head and my bivalves on the dance floor…” Oh my god, I’m gonna throw up.
“Are you not well?” inquires Stu. “Should I play some soothing Renee Geyer tunes?”
“Noooooooooooo. Just Dance” I spit.
But I jest. The food, while not magnificent, was indeed edible. The company, as always, brilliant.
I met Stu when I joined arguably the loudest most dysfunctional book club in the world in 2003. Actually it’s more a club of drinkers who enjoy reading. But none of us enjoyed his selection, Tuesdays with Morrie, that year. And that’s putting it mildly.
Fortunately he has since redeemed himself.
Stu began his career as an educator, teaching drama, theatre studies and English at a high school. I didn’t know him back then, but I’m sure he was an inspiring and popular teacher. I picture him as Melbourne’s Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison’s character in Glee). As a shallow, brash Sydneysider I’ve always been more of a Sue Sylvester.
But he’d made his mark in show business, too, in Australia, with appearances on the hugely popular Hey, Hey It’s Saturday’s Red Faces segment, where his impersonations of Diana Ross, as mentioned in the early part of this tome, Cher, Elton John and Barry Manilow, to name a few, had the audience clamoring for more, and saw him invited back again and again.
He was also in some obscure 70s band that once appeared on the Don Lane Show – yes he even plays a goddam instrument, the piano -- but now I’m giving away his age.
Stu first came to Thailand on holiday in 1987.
“I’d never been overseas before,” he recalls. “I finished teaching in cold, rainy Melbourne on a Friday afternoon, jumped on a plane, and 9 hours later I was in Bangkok. I’ll never forget that heady mix of carbon monoxide, rotten fruit and sewerage. It hit me as soon as I walked out of the airport and into the chaos. I loved it.”
Like many of us, he came back and he stayed, initially teaching before moving to magazine work and back into television as host of Talk of the Town.
These days he is organizer of the Thailand Open Tennis Tournament and other promotional events, which sees him hobnobbing with the likes of Maria Sharapova, the Pet Shop Boys, one of the Williams sisters -- I can never remember which one is which -- Kelly Clarkson, Molly Meldrum, Andrew Biggs and me.
Best of all, he gets freebies. He was able to procure complimentary tickets to the Kylie Minogue concert a while back and for that alone, I will worship him until my dying breath.
Well that and a few other things.
In Bangkok, friendships can be frenetic and transient. Many folk come and go. You like people too intensely and too quickly. Then they’re gone, onto their next posting, their next country, or to escape their looming Bangkok-burnout breakdown.
My friendship with Stu hasn’t been like that at all. It built up slowly, it simmered, it was worth it. Now it’s like a fine wine, or a passable bush claret at least.
It’s comfortable, wonderful and reassuring. I know I can be myself – neuroses, narcissism, blathering idiot, and my 73 other personas on any given night -- and I won’t be judged, or taken particularly seriously.
He and Tum have been together for 8 years. They are like two well-dressed organic peas in a tasteful hydroponic pod. Fun, hospitable, welcoming, and forgiving -- in this case over my total failure to contribute anything remotely meaningful to the bush task I had set them.
So, what have we learned? That bivalves give us terrible wind; that deep-fried grasshoppers are best enjoyed with a chilled white wine and Lady Ga Ga, and that a slap-up Ray Mears’ bush tucker feast is comforting, especially in these troubled times of uncertainty and political turbulence.
Yeah right!